2000-10-21

11:49:14 PM

IETF issues RFC on cookies.
A formal spec for the way cookies ought to behave, according to privacy
advocates, has just been issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
See RFC2965 'HTTP State
Management Mechanism' (25 pp., by Dave Kristol, Bell Labs and Lou Montulli,
formerly of Netscape, now of Epinions.com). Roger Clarke gives the historical
background here --
explaining why it took so long to get a spec issued that considers user privacy
from the get-go.

The mechanisms described in "HTTP State Management Mechanism"
(RFC-2965), and its predecessor (RFC-2109), can be used for
many different purposes. However, some current and potential
uses of the protocol are controversial because they have
significant user privacy and security implications. This memo
identifies specific uses of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
State Management protocol which are either (a) not recommended
by the IETF, or (b) believed to be harmful, and discouraged.
This memo also details additional privacy considerations which
are not covered by the HTTP State Management protocol specification.

2000-10-19

5:12:07 PM

Downside: cash is king.
I assume by now you've all seen f**kedcompany.com --
a spotlight on the predicted imminent demise of particular dot-coms
based on rumors and recent news, with a whole lot of attitude. Now
try Downside's
deathwatch. No attitude at all, just projections from recent SEC
10-K and 10-Q filings. Deathwatch is an automated screen for
money-losing companies running out of cash.

Downside's Deathwatch is a cash-flow analysis. The death date is
simply the day the company will run out of cash, based on their
reported liquid assets and loss rate. When the cash runs out,
something bad for stockholders has to happen.

Here is a sampling of companies whose death date has passed. I could
swear I have seen some of them in headlines involving acquisitions,
mergers, and cutbacks.

Downside's perpetrator is not named on the site -- he refers to
himself simply as "a contrarian in Silicon Valley." According to
whois, that would be John Nagle of Menlo Park. He also holds two
patents
on 3D animation techniques and sells a product called
Falling
Bodies, a dynamics plug-in for softimage|3D.

Many thanks to TBTF Irregular Monty Solomon for this valuable
"investor's reality check."

2000-10-18

9:44:44 PM

Bacteria revived after 250M years.
Yesterday Nature published a paper by scientists who found
ancient bacteria in salt deposits 2000 feet underground in New
Mexico and brought them back to life in a sterile laboratory environment.
[ BBC,
CNN,
AP ]
Until this discovery, the oldest known living survivors were
bacterial spores 25 to 40 million years old discovered in a bee
preserved in amber.

As the
BBC
piece points out, an organism that can live for 250M years in
whatever conditions the earth throws at is could probably survive a
journey across interstellar space aboard a chunk of rock.

9:38:34 AM

Stolen Enigma turns up.
The rare crypto device,
stolen
from Bletchley Park last April, was mailed to Jeremy Paxman,
anchor of a BBC nightly news program. The package had hung around
the mailroom for several days. This
story
does not say whether a ransom was
paid, but a reader can draw that inference. The
BBC's
coverage adds the detail that three of the machine's four
encryption wheels were missing.

2000-10-16

9:27:22 AM

MS Linux -- get it quick.
These guys are skating on thin air. Catch this site quick before
Microsoft's lawyers notice. The bogus MS Linux
site -- "The premier Linux distro" -- not only uses Microsoft
trademarks and graphics, it uses Microsoft's own bandwidth to serve
them up. The first line in the HTML source is

<BASE HREF="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/">

The PR copy is just about pitch-perfect; you might be left wondering
whether MS Linux is real if it weren't for other headlines on the
page such as "Microsoft Invades Cuba." Oh, and the final paragraph in
the description of this new Linux distribution:

MS Linux is released under the provisions of the Gates Private
License, which means you can freely use this Software on a single
machine without warranty after having paid the purchase price and
annual renewal fees.

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